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Bonds’s Denial, Baseball’s Problem

The Giants' Barry Bonds, baseball's career home run leader, at a game at AT&T Park in San Francisco in 2007, his final season.Credit
Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images

Barry Bonds had virtually no peers in his chosen sport, but in the court of law he had 12 of them. On Wednesday, those peers convicted Bonds of one count of obstruction of justice, which will stay with Bonds forever.

This huge decision, with three other counts ending in a hung jury, points to Bonds’s evasiveness before a grand jury about the use of a needle -- that is to say, cheating -- involving his line of work.

He was probably convicted of that one count because of those words and also because of the tears of a confidante, his former personal shopper, Kathy Hoskins, who clearly did not want to be in that courtroom in San Francisco.

“Barry was like, ‘Just do it right here,’ ” Hoskins testified last week, saying she had seen Bonds with his personal trainer, Greg Anderson. “Barry just lifted his shirt up and he said: ‘This is Katie. She’s my girl. She’s not going to say nothing to nobody.’ ”

Hoskins said that Anderson then gave Bonds an injection in the abdomen and that Bonds told her: ‘That’s a little somethin’ somethin’ when I go on the road. You can’t detect it.”

Bonds, 46, will appeal and try to avoid prison time, which is his right, but baseball also has to figure out what to do about the slugger who retired after the 2007 season. Even the one count of obstruction implicates the entire industry, for engaging in omertà during the home run frolics of the late 1990s and early in this decade.

Yes, the country has bigger problems, and yes, the trial was expensive, but people should care about this one conviction because of Bonds’s denial of the needle. There are rules against performance-enhancing drugs in sport, partly to ensure a level playing field and partly because those drugs can be unhealthy for young people. By his own behavior, Bonds acted as if he knew he was breaking rules. He did not care, but we must.

There are precedents for prominent people in sports who break rules.

George M. Steinbrenner was suspended for several years for making illegal campaign contributions and narrowly escaped jail. Pete Rose is ineligible for the Hall of Fame because he lied about gambling while managing the Reds. Baseball now has a legal reason for making Bonds ineligible for the Hall.

It’s a shame, in a way, because Bonds was one of the greatest mixtures of speed and power ever to put on a baseball uniform. He was on his way to a Hall of Fame career in his mid-20s, long before he bulked up and began hitting home runs at a record pace.

Photo

Bonds outside the federal building in San Francisco after the verdict in his perjury trial. Credit
Stephen Lam/Reuters

Baseball is now stuck with more than a guilty verdict for Barry Lamar Bonds. It is also stuck with a stretch limousine full of the biggest sluggers of this generation: Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro and that admitted partaker of steroids, Alex Rodriguez, who is 145 homers behind Bonds after a homer Wednesday, to say nothing of Manny Ramirez, who retired last week facing a 100-game suspension for testing positive for banned drugs.

Baseball cannot very well negate Bonds’s 762 career home runs or his 73 homers in 2001. He hit them. This is not one of those N.C.A.A. deals in which a basketball team “vacates” its place in the Final Four for one violation or another.

Perhaps lulled by the blatant fawning by some members of the committee, Clemens came off as a blowhard as he denied using performance-enhancing drugs. Apparently, the counsels later advised committee members that Clemens’s story did not add up: he was indicted in 2010 and he will go to trial in July.

There is some commonality between Bonds and Clemens, in that both relied on a trainer. Bonds’s man, Greg Anderson, chose to go to jail rather than testify, whereas Clemens’s man, Brian McNamee — once lauded as a genius who knew how to get Clemens and his sidekick Andy Pettitte into great shape — has been encouraged to sing against his old pal.

Bonds and Clemens also seem to have learned the lesson of big-time sports, which is that athletes tend to feel they are above the standards of ordinary citizens.

On Wednesday evening, Commissioner Bud Selig released a statement praising baseball’s rules and testing for drugs but referring only obliquely to “allegations about the conduct of former players.”

This was no allegation; this was a conviction of the career home run leader for obstruction of justice. Major League Baseball will have to deal with it.

Barring some further ruling, both Bonds and Clemens become eligible for the Hall after the 2012 season, when they will have been retired five seasons. They must receive 75 percent of the votes from certified baseball writers.

With that mixed decision on Wednesday, Barry Bonds’s career may be judged by the testimony of a friend with tears in her eyes, who said she saw him injected by his trainer. One needle, one count, one reputation.